Our Grief Can Be Our Hope: Remembering Those Lost to Police Violence This Year
The holiday season often triggers a swell of emotions for families and communities who have lost loved ones to police violence. The silver lining in the otherwise tragic landscape of remembrance is that it can ignite change.
While many experiences can embitter us toward the holiday season—most of us have “that relative” who brings “those politics” to the dinner table—few of us experience grief as profound as those families and communities who have lost loved ones to police violence. While the pain is immeasurable, the problem is not: Last year was the deadliest year on record for police violence, and as of this writing, police killed over 1,000 people in 2023. That means more than 1,000 families and communities, overwhelmingly Black, entering the holidays under the tenebrous specter of loss.
Eddie Irizarry was shot through a rolled-up car window by Officer Mark Dial, who initially described the event as confrontational, alleging Irizarry “lunged” at him with a knife. No such altercation took place. (Dial, initially acquitted, had his charges reinstated on October 25.) Ta’Kiya Young, 21 years old and pregnant, was shot dead by an officer for fleeing after allegedly shoplifting; he has not been charged with murder, though the county coroner ruled her death a homicide. And while all police killings are devastating, few make as grim a travesty of public safety as that of Leonard Allen Cure: exonerated after 16 years wrongfully behind bars only to have police fatally shoot him in a traffic stop gone awry. The agency did not disclose why he was pulled over, but the case remains under investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
These are merely a handful of examples from the deluge of violence police have inflicted on Black communities this year. Justice might beget solace, but the sample is too small to know: 98% of police killings do not result in a charge or conviction. The third officer charged in the murder of Elijah McClain—a 23-year-old who police forcibly sedated to the point of killing him—was not only declared not guilty but recently rehired and awarded $200,000 in backpay. One of the officers who burst into Breonna Taylor’s home, and killed her in a botched drug investigation, was recently awarded a mistrial. The odds are in his favor; none of the officers involved in her murder have been convicted. Time heals all wounds bar those without justice.
Many more have lost their loved ones to police violence not through death, but incarceration. Nearly one percent of the US population is imprisoned, and more still risk missing the holidays standing up for democracy and human rights. The increasingly Draconian nature of our police states undercuts the holiday season with a sinister paradox: celebration erases, and therefore exacerbates, the suffering of those behind bars and their communities. This, too, is measurable: suicides spike amongst people experiencing incarceration as the holidays near.
Alongside unprecedented violence at home and abroad, these facts undercut the holiday season, discoloring its usual brightness. That is why at CPE, we are committed to pairing our remembrance with action, and it’s in our successes this past year we find essential glimmers of hope. In 2023, we worked with the Los Angeles Sheriff Department’s West Hollywood Station and three different agencies within Connecticut to share findings about racial disparities in their policing with their respective communities. In St. Louis, we helped support the implementation of select recommendations regarding interpersonal and domestic violence in the city, an awareness campaign to spur involvement in public safety redesign, and a city-wide survey to capture sentiments about public safety that may better inform redesign efforts later. We also launched Community Up, a program that is putting much-needed resources in the hands of organizers and community stakeholders to help them improve their local public safety systems. Across the country, progress is being made.
The silver lining in the otherwise tragic landscape of remembrance is that it can ignite change. In remembering those lost to police violence, we keep the urgency of their loss alive, allowing feelings to blossom into action. Remembering Eddie, Ta’Kiya, Leonard, and the hundreds of others lost this year—not to mention Elijah, Breonna, and the countless others lost in years preceding—is an exercise not just in mourning but hope. Memory is political. What we remember and whose memory we privilege dictates our representation and constructs the meaning of our history and our existence going forward. This is why President Eisenhower invited the media to document the horrors he saw at the Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 1945—even amidst the fight, he (correctly) foresaw a day when the Holocaust would be denied. Insisting on remembering those lost, on uplifting the past at a time when it may be painful to do so, can tip the scales toward change and, ultimately, toward securing a safer future for all. Memory connects us to our community, to ourselves, and to action, be it at the polls or in the streets. As a new year approaches, we are hungry for change and the promise of renewal; however, it’s only by looking back that we can effectively move forward.